It’s early days, but the team at interest.co.nz must be happy that their new site is now up and running. It’s running on a much better platform so they should be able to tweak it a lot in response to readers. And tweak they will need to do. Sadly for me the site has taken …
Category Archives: NZ Business
So, Lingopal, you have 208,000 search responses
I was happy to see Lingopal returned 208,000 responses on Google. That’s pretty good right? Well – it is, but it’s pretty humbling when compared to some other products. I expected we’d be a lot smaller than “Sex”, “drugs” and “rock and roll”, and “Avatar” and “Apple” had great publicity. But “iPad”, which didn’t even …
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Welcome to Cadimage
I’ve just joined the board of directors for Cadimage, joining majority owners Campbell Yule and Tracey Gatland. Actually – there are three companies involved but one smart team. Cadimage subsidiary Graphisoft NZ resells and supports ArchiCAD, which is the most popular CAD program used by architects here. It is pretty cool. Graphisoft supports the industry …
NZ Government’s $321m for technology fails to help
I’ll use three companies where I have equity and active involvement in to critique the announced $321m new funding for Research Science and Technology in business. In short the program will help none of the 10 or so NZ companies that I am involved with. While it may work for larger companies this program does …
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WSJ Upsell – Go Pro now
A very clever move by WSJ.com, who have introduced a way to eek more money out of subscribers. It’s WSJ Professional Edition – and which professional cannot resist having their employer pay the $25 extra per month to get these extras: Frankly those extras should be included with the WSJ subscription, and this is simply …
How not to survey social media, and how to recover
You want to run a survey on social media – so you ask give StopPress a chance to ask their readers for questions. Unfortunately the commentators have a different take on your great idea – and accuse you of firstly not being social media experts and secondly of being lazy. It doesn’t help that you …
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Copyright Bill submission
I just made a submission to the Select Committee reviewing the Copyright Amendment Bill. You can too. Here it is: The bill is much improved from previous versions, and I thank the committee for that. Like the other co-founders of Pacific Fibre I was driven to start the project by a sense of frustration at …
Unleash those cabinets please
A surprising puff piece from Chris Keall in the NBR sings the praises of Telecom’s Chorus Division’s cabinet roll out: The Telecom division is now half way through its government-mandated project to roll-out 3600 roadside fibre optic cable cabinets around neighborhoods nationwide. Each shortens the distance that data has to travel over an older copper …
Never surrender Air New Zealand
Yes – I know the trans Tasman fares are pretty low, making it hard to compete. Yes I know that code sharing gives more flights. But I also know that Pacific Blue is not Air New Zealand, and when I want to fly on Pacific Blue I book Pacific Blue. I also know that merging …
Your time is nigh Ticketek. React or die.
Been to this site recently? Not many have. Just 6500 visitors a day visit Autotrader, a lot less than the over 140,000 per day average that visit Trade Me Motors. Autotrader lost because everything was just too hard and too expensive. Their business practices were inherently expensive and unfair to dealers, and the process was …
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Who gives you financial advice?
“Chief executive Charles Anderson said the level of qualification among the SovNet force varied from nothing more than high school exams through to a handful with university degrees.” Maria Slade, NZHerald That’s the CE from Sovereign, an insurance company, and he was referring to the need for their 4o0 financial advisers to become certified within …
The best form of imitation: Rugbyheaven.co.nz and SuperXV.com
Fairfax NZ’s Rugbyheaven.co.nz site has been subsumed into the Stuff site. It’s all about making sure the traffic goes to one place (Stuff), and beating the total traffic and visitors at NZHerald. I was inside Fairfax Digital at the time, and felt the team did a great job with the design, and it is sad …
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Temporary becomes permament
“The issue with credit cards cards has been around for 14 months” said another customer at ACC’s Victoria street car park today. The issue is that the machines do not accept credit cards. That’s not temporary and that’s not parking right.
How to have a US iTunes account on your iPad, iPhone, Apple TV
Thanks to Rob Isaac, who sent 6 eager new iPad owners instructions the other day, here’s how to open a US iTunes account. You can have multiple iTunes accounts, and one of them can (should) be a USA account. If you use the USA account then you will see a lot more content, and you …
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Notes on the iPad
These are some very rough notes that I wrote to prepare for an interview on Radio New Zealand yesterday. I wrote the note, and am posting this from, the iPad. This morning I bought six ipads into New Zealand – they are all allocated sorry. And yes – I did pay GST on them. Overall …
Lance Wiggs 